Microsoft Fires Seinfeld From Vista Ad Campaign

Officially, the PR team in Redmond keeps stating that the Seinfeld ads were just a phase of the campaign and now Microsoft’s marketing effort must move on.

It could be so, but one has to wonder why would Microsoft pay the rumored $10 million for a couple of ads that did little to “tease” consumers. It did manage to raise a lot of criticism though, but that’s something Microsoft did very well by itself only with Vista.

Most likely, the campaign was accepted as a failure (it was highly uncommunicative, to be honest) and the Redmond company decided to pull the plug and fill the advertising void with new commercials that actually said something.

According to the New York Times, the next wave of Vista ads will try to counter the famous “I’m a Mac – I’m a PC”:

“One new Microsoft commercial even begins with a company engineer who resembles John Hodgman, the comedian portraying the loser PC character in the Apple campaign. “Hello, I’m a PC,” the engineer says, echoing Mr. Hodgman’s recurring line, “and I’ve been made into a stereotype.””

This should fine for Microsoft, but should really remind the top execs in Redmond that Apple is not their worst enemy. One could say Windows Xp could fill such shoes, while others would name the poor job the company did with Vista.